distributed.net – the fastest computer on earth

This topic deals with distributed.net.
In particular, it deals with the installation of one of their client programs to
allow my computer to help them on their missions. It’s a volunteer organisation.
They do things like find prime numbers and tackling large problems in encryption.
They make use of the idle time of computers all over the Internet.

Project RC5-64

The RC5-64 project (also known as Bovine
RC5 Effort) attempts to crack a 64-bit encryption code. They will be doing this by
brute force (i.e. trying every possible key). I decided to participate as my
computers spend a great deal of time idle. The prize money was also an incentive.

Participation
in the project consists of installing software on your machine and running it. This
software will then use the otherwise-unused CPU cycles on your computer to help the
project.

Want to know more?

Installing the software

If you choose to participate in this project, I would strongly advise you to obtain
your clients only from the official source. Start at the distributed.net client page and you
should find what you need.

In short, what you will do is something like this:

fetch <filename>
gunzip <filename>.tgz
tar -xvf <filename>.tar

After these steps, I suggest that you scan the readme file which should be included.
It will tell you much of what you will want to know.